Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

Easy Async and Await for VBs Part 1, or…

...letting your code do absolutely nothing! We’ve all been there, one way or the other. Either as users of an app or as the developer to whom users complained to: When a typical Win32 app is waiting for an operation to complete, we often get to see something like this: (image) In discussions about how to get a handle on such scenarios there...

VB Universal Windows App Part 5: calling into platform-specific APIs from PCL

This is Part 5 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've been able to re-use all our code and XAML by placing them in the PCL. Actually, PCLs can only ever contain calls to APIs that are common to the platforms they target. This generally isn't a problem, because most APIs on Windows also exist on Windows Phone, ...

VB Universal Windows App Part 4: using SharpDX for sound effects

This is Part 4 of the "VB Universal Windows App" series: So far we've built a solid app, sharing as much code and XAML as possible by placing it in our PCL. For today's post we'll continue the process, adding game-quality sound effects to our app. SharpDX is the best way to do this. Please bear with me. This is a long ...

*New* video series on Windows Store App development using Visual Basic on Microsoft Virtual Academy

Hey VB hackers, Microsoft Virtual Academy recently published a six-part series all about building modern apps for the Windows Store using your favorite language and staring Visual Basic MVP Bill Burrows and yours truly :) (image) Microsoft Virtual Academy is a free service available to anyone to sharpen their skills and learn the latest and ...

Visual Basic 11 Beta Available for Download!

As you may have read in Jason’s announcement, today we announced that Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download.  This is a huge release for Visual Basic as it provides full platform support for building Windows 8 Metro style apps, a first-class asynchronous programming experience, and also the long-awaited Iterators ...

New Async Programming Video's

Some great new video's on MSDN showing how to do async programming using the Async CTP. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh378091.aspx There are different versions of video's for both VB and C#.    This is a great opportunity to see the power of the new Async languages featuresand follow through a series of examples ...

Simultaneous Async Tasks (Alan Berman)

The new Async feature in the Visual Studio Async CTP (SP1 Refresh) provides an elegantly simple technique to make code asynchronous.Our writing team uses an internal app that would benefit from asynchronous calls.  For each URL contained in the MSDN documentation that we publish, the app lists the title from the link, and the title parsed...

Async Feature Control Flow (Alan Berman)

What is asynchronous programming? Let's say you send out an email, then wait and do nothing for the two minutes it takes to get a response back. You do nothing while you're waiting. It's worth waiting because it'll be back fast. When that happens, sending the email and getting a response is synchronous. But another time you send an email and ...